It’s late afternoon on a Tuesday, and Saru Jayaraman is at Washington Dulles International Airport an hour early for her trip home to Oakland. The flight bookends a five-day business excursion for Jayaraman, a blur of meetings across six states, with each stop focused on improving working conditions for the restaurant industry.

The trip, ambitious in its scheduling and scope, is a microcosm of Jayaraman’s two-decade crusade to address the country’s most contentious issues: increasing minimum wage, confronting sexual harassment, erasing racial disparity, creating safe professional work environments. It’s an exacting role for the 43-year-old. Rarely is she not on the move. Rarely is her calendar not overflowing with engagements.

Such is life for one of the most powerful, and important, figures in the restaurant world. Jayaraman has made a mission out of giving a louder voice to workers, especially women and people of color, two groups that have been shown to be marginalized in the restaurant industry.

“I know one thing: When she speaks, people listen,” said Nigel Jones, the chef behind San Francisco’s Kaya and Oakland’s Kingston 11. “She has presence that most people just don’t have. And she doesn’t have to be in front of thousands of people to know how powerful she is.”

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Jayaraman’s formal titles include president and co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center United, a national restaurant worker advocacy group of more than 600 restaurant owners, 25,000 workers and 15,000 consumers, as well as director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley.

About VisionSF

This is one of six profiles of finalists for The Chronicle’s fifth annual Visionary of the Year award. The honor salutes leaders who strive to make the world a better place and drive social and economic change by employing new, innovative business models and practices. The finalists were selected by a nominating committee that included Daniel Lurie, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Tipping Point Community; John Diaz, editorial page editor of The Chronicle; London Breed, mayor of San Francisco; Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose; Libby Schaaf, mayor of Oakland; Charlotte Shultz, chief of protocol for the city and county of San Francisco; and George Shultz, former U.S. secretary of state.

Chronicle Publisher Bill Nagel, Editor in Chief Audrey Cooper and Diaz will select the winner, which will be announced in late March.

In the food world, though, Jayaraman has become known as a relentless advocate for workers’ rights who has left an indelible mark on the Bay Area restaurant industry.

Because of this leadership in revolutionizing the restaurant industry, Jayaraman is a nominee for the The Chronicle’s 2019 Visionary of the Year, an annual recognition of Bay Area leaders whose work improves the world.

“In this rapidly growing private sector, you have millions of underpaid workers,” Jayaraman said. “It’s those people, the ones who feel like they’re being ignored, that you have to care about.”

Her transition from behind-the-scenes power player to national leader was crystallized last year when she walked the red carpet at the 75th Golden Globe Awards alongside comic actress Amy Poehler. The invitation was a byproduct of her work within the country’s #MeToo movement. Host Seth Meyers even mentioned Jayaraman by name during his opening monologue.

Xavier de Souza Briggs of the Ford Foundation in New York, which Restaurant Opportunities Center United counts as one of its supporting partners, was not surprised to see Jayaraman on the red carpet for her efforts. The two have known each other since Jayaraman’s graduate student days at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“Saru has also been prescient in making connections between sexual harassment and the lower wages for tipped workers before the #MeToo movement took shape and to push the industry toward fair treatment,” Briggs said in an email. “Both harassment and low wages reflect the underlying problem of vulnerability, especially of female workers and workers of color.”

Long before focusing on the restaurant industry, Jayaraman was a kid in the city of Whittier, outside of Los Angeles, being raised by South Indian parents from the state of Tamil Nadu. Her predominantly Chicano-Latino community was a blue-collar place, filled with working-class families.

After high school, Jayaraman attended UCLA, where her activism began to blossom. During her undergraduate years, she founded a nonprofit to help empower young women called Women and Youth Supporting Each Other. Yale Law School followed, as did studies at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Upon completion, she worked at a center for immigrant workers on Long Island, N.Y.

Then 9/11 happened.

Seventy-three low-wage immigrant workers died at Windows on the World, a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, Tower 1. Three hundred workers at the restaurant lost their jobs. Jayaraman worked to help them find jobs. During that time she co-founded ROC United with Fekkak Mamdouh, a Moroccan immigrant who was a waiter at Windows on the World.

The work made sense for Jayaraman. Ethnic identity and societal views of race had shaped her childhood. She recalls as a child witnessing the racism her immigrant parents often faced. One of the stories she still tells involves a family trip to Utah, where her parents’ car broke down and they were refused service by several mechanics. For a young person, it put racism into context.

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“It’s something I’ll never forget,” she said. “It’s hard not to have anger over that. It makes you want to protect people, to make sure that discrimination doesn’t happen to others.”

Jayaraman’s speeches, whether on HBO’s “Real Time” or at civic events, are imbued with a palpable confidence and a disarming syntax, a blend that makes her charisma appear steeped in approachability. At the same time, it’s a seemingly endless knowledge of industry issues that allows her to command any room where her insight has been requested.

In 2014, Jayaraman’s restaurant worker advocacy group published a study called “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry,” which is recognized as one of the most in-depth reports of the industry’s problems.

Despite a reputation as a liberal and inclusive region, San Francisco’s race/wage gap in the food service realm is the highest in the country. ROC United studies show white male restaurant workers in San Francisco get paid $6 more per hour than their Latino, black and Asian American counterparts. Based on the data, server positions in the front of the house are more often occupied by white workers while back-of-the-house positions, such as bussers and dishwashers, are filled primarily by people of color.

Jayaraman’s actions have spurred change in the Bay Area, albeit subtle and nuanced. The topic of occupational segregation and representation in the workforce has become a more common conversation in the industry when, years ago, it was rarely discussed. Some chefs and restaurateurs have even been building their business models around racial inclusion.

Jayaraman’s ROC United also addressed race in the industry by implementing a program that fosters racial equity within the predominantly white fine-dining realm. Daniel Patterson, who owns several high-end Bay Area restaurants such as Coi, was one of the program’s earliest participants. The program encourages restaurant owners to provide opportunities to employees of color by training and cycling them through the front-of-the-house positions predominantly held by white workers. Ultimately, Patterson tied pay to people and not positions.

“I love Saru’s determination,” he said, adding that her “passionate and uncompromising pursuit of a more just industry” is what has made her such a unique force in the restaurant world.

On a national scale, Jayaraman’s efforts have resulted in legislation capable of seismic industry-wide change. The minimum wage for service employees who can earn gratuities is lower than the standard rate in all but seven states.

The Raise the Wage Act of 2019, created by Jayaraman’s ROC United and the National Employment Law Project, was introduced in Congress this year. It would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.55 this year and reduce many workers’ reliance on tips. Over the next five years, it would rise to $15 per hour by 2024. Jayaraman has been championing the legislation for years.

The legislation, which would be a boon to women, especially women of color, has the support of Democratic leadership in Congress. According to recent data, roughly 70 percent of tipped workers are women, but they earn only 70 percent of what their male counterparts earn.

“This is about not only money — the $15 — but the values that our country is about,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a January event in Washington, D.C., to introduce the Raise the Wage Act.

“Change in this business comes in waves,” Jayaraman said. “Some periods, it seems as though nothing is changing, then all of the sudden, there’s a burst of progress. You just have to stay on track.”

Jayaraman’s career has been a breathless pursuit to bring restaurant industry issues into a national conversation.

“I say this a lot, but there is always work to be done,” she said. “You can’t rest while thinking things will change by themselves.”